Video game studio Quantic Dreams — who you may remember helmed the PS3 crime thriller Heavy Rain — has now released a new short film starring the voice and digital likeness of actress Valorie Curry (Twilight, Veronica Mars). According to Quantic Dreams CEO David Cage, this heart-rending short uses technology more typical of Hollywood than video game studios. He explained to Eurogamer:

Heavy Rain was shot with 28 cameras, and we've upgraded the studio to 65 cameras. Now we can shoot several actors - their body and their face - at the same time. It's not a small change, but at the same time this is how Avatar and Tintin were shot, and it's how the CG industry works because they know how much you gain from shooting face, voice and body at the same time [...]

For me I imagine that [machine consciousness will] happen like a bug in a factory, and it's something that should never happen - but it happened. It's the beginning of something, and you can easily imagine how more Karas can be built having this emotional sense and how the world could change based on that.

Cage claims that Project KARA isn't the harbinger of a new project down the road. But Quantic's last digital short, The Casting, led to Heavy Rain, so take that as you will. Hat tip to Ursus-Veritas and Micheal!